Why ChatGPT doesn’t mention your accounting firm, and the fix

You asked ChatGPT for the best accountant for tradies in Parramatta (or dentists in Leeds, or restaurants in Austin), and it named three firms. None of them was yours.

Usually that is fixable. AI answer engines mostly do not “know” which accountants are good. They run a search, read the results and summarise them. If your firm never shows up in that search step, or shows up with nothing to back it, it does not make the answer.

For current or local questions, the big assistants look things up rather than answer from memory. As at September 2026, here is what the providers say:

• ChatGPT. OpenAI’s help centre says ChatGPT search uses third-party search providers, including Microsoft Bing, and rewrites your question into one or more search queries before it answers. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites that block its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”.
• Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google’s own guidance says there are “no additional requirements” to appear. A page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. Ordinary SEO is the whole game.
• Perplexity. Its crawler documentation says PerplexityBot exists to surface and link websites in its results, and asks site owners to allow it in robots.txt.
• Claude. Anthropic’s help centre describes a Claude-SearchBot crawler for search results and says blocking it may reduce visibility in Claude’s answers. Anthropic’s published subprocessor list names Brave Search as a web search provider.

For “near me” questions, local data matters as much as web pages. Google says its local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, that “more reviews and positive ratings can help”, and that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show. How ChatGPT sources local business listings is less clear. Several SEO firms report that it leans on data providers such as Foursquare and Yelp alongside Bing. OpenAI has not published the detail, so treat that as informed guesswork.

Then there is corroboration. In a May 2025 study of 75,000 brands, Ahrefs found that mentions of a brand across the web correlated with visibility in Google AI Overviews more strongly than anything else it measured (0.664), well ahead of backlinks (0.218). Two caveats the authors make themselves: correlation is not causation, and the sample was established sites, not ten-person practices. Still, a firm other credible sites talk about is easier for a machine to name with confidence.

The verdict: there is no secret AI lever. Be findable in the indexes these tools search, be described the same way everywhere, and be mentioned by someone other than yourself.

Find out which part is broken first. Use a private window and run each prompt twice, because answers vary between runs.

1. Ask the question your best client would ask (8 minutes). In ChatGPT (with search on), Perplexity, Google and Claude, try prompts like: “Best accountant for [niche] in [suburb or city]”, “Who does [service, e.g. SMSF audits] in [city]?”, “Recommend a small business accountant in [city] who uses Xero”, and “What do people say about [your firm name]?”
2. Read the citations, not just the names (5 minutes). Click the sources under each answer. Note which directories, review sites, association listings and articles keep appearing. Those are the sources the tools trust for your market.
3. Check what the tools say about you by name (3 minutes). If “tell me about [your firm]” returns wrong services, an old address or nothing at all, your problem is entity information, not ranking.
4. Check you are not blocking them (4 minutes). Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Look for “Disallow: /“ under OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Bingbot or “User-agent: *”. Then search Bing and Google for “site:yourdomain.com” to confirm your service pages are indexed at all.

What you found	Likely cause	Start with
Not named, and your pages are missing from Bing or Google	Indexing or a robots.txt block	Fix 8
Not named, but indexed	No page that matches the question	Fixes 1 and 2
Named with wrong details	Inconsistent business information	Fix 3
Competitors named via review sites and directories you are absent from	Weak third-party signal	Fixes 3, 4 and 5

1. Service, location and niche pages in plain language

An assistant answering “accountant for physios in Brisbane” can only cite a page that says, in words, that you are an accountant who works with physios in Brisbane. Write one page per core service and one per niche you genuinely serve, each naming the service, who it is for, where you work (including remote, if you do), and what the engagement involves. Do not spin up a page for every suburb within 50 kilometres; thin near-duplicates are what search engines are built to ignore.

2. FAQ content that answers real client questions

Pull the questions from your inbox and discovery calls: “Do you work with businesses outside [city]?”, “Can you take over from my current accountant mid-year?”, “Do you handle [specific software] or only [other software]?” Answer each one directly in the first sentence, then add the detail. These look like the prompts people type into assistants, which is why they get quoted.

3. Consistent business details everywhere

Your firm’s name, address, phone number, website and category should read identically on your site, your Google Business Profile, Bing Places (Bing’s equivalent, and the index behind ChatGPT search), LinkedIn and every directory you appear in. Complete the Google Business Profile properly: primary category, services, service areas, hours and a description that names your niches. Then claim your professional body’s public directory listing. CPA Australia’s Find a CPA, CA ANZ’s Find a CA and ICAEW’s Find a Chartered Accountant are searchable by the public, and CPA Australia requires members in public practice to opt in on their profile before they are listed.

4. Reviews, gathered honestly

Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking, and review text gives an assistant specific things to repeat: “sorted our R&D claim”, “great with hospitality clients”. Build the ask into the end of every engagement, and reply to reviews, critical ones included. Do not offer incentives for reviews; Google’s review policies do not allow it.

5. Being cited on other sites

This is the slow one and, if the Ahrefs data holds for small firms, the one that matters most. Useful mentions come from places with their own authority: your professional body (speaking, committee work, member profiles), industry media, local business associations, software vendors’ partner directories where you genuinely hold the status, and client case studies published on a client’s site. One article with a real point of view beats fifty paid directory submissions.

6. Schema.org basics

Structured data tells machines unambiguous facts about your business. Schema.org has an AccountingService type (a kind of LocalBusiness) where you can state your name, address, phone, URL, hours and area served. Add it to your home and contact pages, and keep it identical to your Google Business Profile. Two limits: Google says it does not guarantee any search feature from structured data, and marking up testimonials on your own site as reviews will not earn star ratings, because Google treats reviews a business controls about itself as self-serving.

7. llms.txt, honestly

llms.txt is a proposal, published by Jeremy Howard in September 2024, for a plain-text file that summarises a site for AI tools. Adoption by the answer engines is unproven. Google’s John Mueller said in June 2025 that no AI system then used it, and Google’s AI features guidance says you do not need new “AI text files” to appear. Writing one takes an hour, so do it if you like, but do not expect it to change who gets named.

8. Not blocking AI crawlers by accident

Some templates, security plugins and hosting settings block AI bots wholesale. Cloudflare, for one, began asking new domains in July 2025 whether to block AI crawlers by default. Know the difference: GPTBot and ClaudeBot collect training data, while OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot feed search answers. You can block training and still allow search. Blocking everything keeps you out of the answers you are trying to get into.

“AI SEO” and “GEO” packages are being sold to accounting firms with confident promises. Be sceptical of anyone who guarantees placement in ChatGPT (nobody controls it), sells a proprietary “AI visibility score” without saying how it is measured, charges extra for an llms.txt file, or proposes hundreds of auto-generated location pages. Everything above can be done in-house or by whoever already maintains your site. If you want a wider plan, our accounting firm marketing guide puts this work in context, and the ChatGPT guide for accountants covers the tool from the other side of the desk.

• Run the test prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google and Claude, save the answers and the cited sources.
• Check robots.txt, Cloudflare and security plugins for blocked search crawlers, and confirm Google and Bing index your service pages.
• Write one plain-language page per core service and per genuine niche.
• Publish answers to ten real client questions.
• Make name, address, phone and website identical on your site, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, LinkedIn and directories.
• Claim your professional body’s public directory listing.
• Build review requests into the end of every engagement.
• Pitch one article or comment to industry media or your professional body each quarter.
• Add AccountingService structured data that matches your Google Business Profile.
• Rerun the test prompts in 90 days and compare.

For more on where AI tools fit in a practice, see AI for accounting firms.

Why does ChatGPT name one set of firms today and different ones tomorrow?

Answers are generated fresh each time, and the search step can return different sources depending on how the question is rewritten, the location ChatGPT infers and what the search provider returns that day. Track the same prompts over months and read the trend, not one result.

Can I pay OpenAI or Google to be recommended in AI answers?

Not as an organic recommendation. As at September 2026, neither OpenAI nor Google offers a way to buy a place in the answer text itself. Any vendor implying they have a direct line into those systems is overselling, and advertising, where it exists, is labelled as such.

Does a small firm stand a chance against the big networks in AI answers?

Yes, on specific questions. Large firms dominate broad prompts, but a prompt about a niche and a suburb has far fewer credible pages to choose from. Small firms win by being the clearest match for questions the big brands never write about.

Should I block GPTBot to stop my content training AI models?

You can, and according to OpenAI’s documentation it will not remove you from ChatGPT search, which relies on OAI-SearchBot instead. The same split exists at Anthropic between ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot. Decide the training question on its merits, and keep the search crawlers allowed if you want to be named.

How long before changes show up in AI answers?

There is no published timetable. Changes to your own site depend on how quickly Google and Bing recrawl it, which can take days to weeks. Third-party mentions and reviews build over months. A quarterly rerun of your test prompts is a fair read.